


Of Monsters

by jibrailis



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-07
Updated: 2011-12-07
Packaged: 2017-10-27 01:41:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/290275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jibrailis/pseuds/jibrailis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yusuf is a dream-eater.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Monsters

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt](http://inception-kink.livejournal.com/20092.html?thread=48154492) on the kink meme. First posted anonymously.
> 
> Warnings for dark themes and amoral/predatory characters.

_Sample K72-5, 30 ml, obtained October 4 1987, with the label "Katya Marinovova."_

The dreams of the newly born taste like water. They have a clear, light quality to them that goes down Yusuf's throat — a fresh taste. Some might say a nothing taste, and it's true that the dreams of newborns don't acquire the rich smokiness that can only come with age and experience, from seeing the world and living life. Yusuf will be the first to admit that these are not his favourite flavour of dreams, and yet he will defend them against naysayers, because the first dream of a new life is poignant, in a way, and he has a romantic sensibility that appreciates it. They are virgin dreams, untouched until he tilts the bottle to his lips and drinks them down.

 

_Sample N22-7, 13 ml, obtained January 21 1677, with the label "Jonathan Deversham."_

To drink someone's last dream is like drinking a mixture of spices, a tonic so deep and multi-layered that those inexperienced with dream-eating will likely choke on it. It too is an acquired taste. Last dreams are often heavy dreams, cooked for too long and brewed too often. They are sad dreams, mostly, even in those who have lived a happy life. Last dreams are notoriously difficult to collect, because to know that a dream is one's last is usually a province of the slowly dying, of the ill and elderly. They often have a bitter aftertaste. Yusuf has a special shelf for these deathbed dreams, and he likes to imbibe on them on the longest night of the year.

 

_Sample K15-2, 7 ml, obtained March 16 1960, with the label "Udo Maazi."_

This is a dream for the thrill-seeker. This is the dream of a man who was dictator, who slaughtered thousands for his whimsy, for his politics, because they looked at him with hate and he did not want that. This dream is kept on the shelf with the other murderer dreams in Yusuf's collection, and he has plenty of those, because many men (and some women too) are murderers. The best surprise is finding a murderer dream in a sample that he wouldn't think contained one — to drink the dream of an old Italian nun and taste the metallic blood in it. It is a sorrow as well as a pleasure.

 

_Sample A26-1, 3 ml, obtained in the year 520, with the label "Fairuza in the tent by the camels."_

This is an old dream, though not the oldest in Yusuf's collection. This dream tastes like insects and steel, like dried dates, and fire, like heartstrings, like sugar. Yusuf loves this dream, but he has little of it left, so he conserves it as much as he can, drinking it only when he has a craving. It comes from a woman he once met in the Arabian desert, a madwoman and a soothsayer. He remembers the feel of her dried hair underneath his hands when he kissed her, drawing the dream from her mouth. It tastes a little different every time he opens the bottle. It tastes like a vision never written down.

 

_Sample L48-9, 28 ml, obtained May 1 2001, with the label 'Li Sun Choo.'"_

This is a very quiet dream, with a creamy taste that fills the back of Yusuf's throat and lingers there for hours. There are no complex notes, like in the dreams of a madwoman or in the dreams of someone dying, but there is a deepness there that Yusuf finds himself wanting time and time again. It is the dream of a woman who has been in a coma for twenty-three years. She has no higher brain function, and yet Yusuf was able to siphon this dream from her. It is the closest thing he has to the dreams of the dead.

 

* * *

 

His friend Gitonga steps through the door into his den, and he looks around at the slumbering dreamers. "Still up to your old tricks, are you?" he asks.

Yusuf smiles placidly. "A man has to eat."

"Undoubtedly," Gitonga replies, "but unlike you, I don't raise my food like chattel. I hunt when the need strikes me."

"And how often do you fail your hunt and go hungry as a result?" Yusuf asks. "Sit, sit, my friend," he says, finding a chair for Gitonga, and they are seated by Yusuf's desk, which has a view of the entire den, with all the dreamers on their couches, their arms spread to allow for the ease of the IV tubes that feed them, as well as the lines that sedate them. "Some people raise chickens, others raise cows. I raise my dreamers," Yusuf says. "Unlike the chickens and the cows, they come here willingly, I assure you."

"What sort of person would willingly sleep their life away?" Gitonga asks.

"An unhappy one," Yusuf says. He excuses himself, retreating into his cellar. When he returns he has a small red bottle with him, a medicine bottle. He takes two cups and pours a thin amount of liquid in each. "A vintage to celebrate your visit," he declares. "This is the dream of a man who lusted after his sister. A very passionate, sinful taste — I know how you like those."

"How did you acquire this dream?" Gitonga asks, sniffing it.

"I followed him carefully," Yusuf says. "I observed him. And then, when he was sleeping in his bed, I crept through his window and I took this dream from him."

"I had thought you might have traded for it," Gitonga admits.

"I dabble in trade every now and then, when a particularly fine specimen comes on the market," Yusuf says. He sips the contents of his cup, and his body feels flushed with the warmth of the first taste — ah yes, there is the sinful guilt, and it tastes like chocolate with a trace of cinnamon, like the feel of a too-humid summer afternoon. "But mostly I like to hunt my dreams on my own. I spend seven months of the year in Mombasa, and the other five, I travel the world and develop my collection."

"You've done well for yourself," Gitonga says, and he sounds mildly jealous. Gitonga is one of the newer dream-eaters, young and awkward on his feet. He still feels guilt when he hunts for dreamers, but a few more years will change that — whether a few is measured in decades or centuries, Yusuf cannot yet tell.

"I am a gourmand," Yusuf says modestly. "I make my biological need my hobby. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for every dream-eater. But there are so few of us left after the wars, and who am I to say?"

Gitonga changes the subject. "Have you heard of a living dream?"

"A myth."

"A persistent myth," Gitonga replies. "They say there is one right here in the city! Surely you've heard of this?"

"I've heard," Yusuf says, "but then again, I hear of these stories at least five times a year. There is one in Singapore yesterday, there is one in Sri Jayawardenapura today, there is one in Berlin tomorrow — I grow tired of them. Nonsense stories. A dream cannot be made living. It cannot develop its own consciousness."

"Why not?" Gitonga asks, and if Yusuf didn't know his age before, he knows it now. "If we can develop dreamshare technology, if we can master dreams, then why can't it be possible that a dream can take flesh and walk among us?"

"It is a dream. It is not a living thing."

"It was made from a living thing. If it is the dream of someone the dreamer knew, then it used to _be_ a living thing," Gitonga says. He tilts his cup in his hand, the precious liquid sloshing from one side to another. "They say it's a woman. A French woman. They say she walks the streets in Likoni, and she is beautiful, but her eyes are sad."

"A French woman with sad eyes." Yusuf laughs. "Do you even realize how ridiculous you sound?"

"Go and see for yourself," Gitonga says. "Then judge me, if you must."

 

* * *

 

The stones tell stories, and in the Old Town of Mombasa where Yusuf lives, the stones speak loudly indeed. They are adobe, and brick, and red, and yellow, and brown — Muslim mosques stand beside Portuguese churches, legacies of colonialism, of all the conquerors who have swept through this land and tried to marry themselves to its soil. Yusuf has bottled many delicious dreams here, in this crossroads land, where too many people still die far too young, and where children exhale dreams that end before their fifth birthday.

Likoni is a neighbourhood on the south side of Mombasa Island. To reach it, one must take the ferry. Yusuf prepares for a day in Likoni by packing his lunch: some flatbread and fruit for appearance's sake, and a bottle that looks like wine but in actuality contains a dream from one of his favourites in the den. She is a girl named Elisabet who dreams of mazes with no heart, and whose dreams always taste like persimmons.

There are many poor in Likoni, but Yusuf walks by them peaceably. He talks to some on the street when it strikes him to, and ignores the rest when he must. He is indulging Gitonga, that is all. He is indulging one of his few friends in the city by paying a visit to the woman who says she saw a living dream. Gitonga has given him an address. Now Yusuf must merely find it.

She is sitting in her house, pregnant with her third child. Yusuf can smell the nascent life in her belly. When she sees him approach, she shudders. There are some people who can sense dream-eaters. They don't know what it is that they are sensing, except it feels to them like a chilled breeze passing through their chest.

Yusuf smiles at her. "Mrs. Luo, I have come here to ask you about a woman. I bring you these fruits and this freshly baked flatbread as payment." His language is formal — if he doesn't make an effort, Yusuf tends to speak in the slightly inflected English of days gone by. Changing with the times is difficult in this respect. He tries to keep up with accents and slang, but it's usually not worth his time. Better to be thought of a quaint gentleman instead.

Mrs. Luo says, "Why should I tell you? I don't like your eyes."

"That is very hurtful, madam," Yusuf says. "But I will leave the fruit and the flatbread here, and I will come back later tonight."

"Don't come back," she says. "I don't want to see you again."

Yusuf sees that she means it. The sixth sense is strong in her, and for those who sense them, it's quite natural to have a distrust of a man who wants to eat the insides of your mind. So he does return, but late at night when Mrs. Luo is sleeping with her husband on their cot, two of her youngest children tucked at her side. She is snoring, and she stirs when he approaches, half-revealed by the moonlight.

Yusuf waits, but she does not wake.

He bends over and presses his mouth to hers, stealing her breath, stealing her dream. She is cold to the touch, and her dream feels like snow — strange here, in this warm country. He sees a woman walking by the house last week, a woman with dark hair who looks at Mrs. Luo suddenly, and Mrs. Luo is fixed with the certainty that this woman should not exist.

 _This is the dead woman_ , says the dream. _She sees me! She sees me! I am frightened._

Yusuf leans back, licking the residue of the dream in his mouth after he swallows. He raises his eyebrows in reluctant surprise.

 

* * *

 

Yusuf does not know how to go about luring a living dream, if that is what this French woman should be — and he has his doubts. He knows how to distill even the roughest dream to its essence; he knows how to bottle dreams so that they will last against the wages of time and weather; he knows how to court saints and befriend kings so that he may taste their nocturnal reveries. He does not know this.

However, he _does_ know how to lure a dream-eater, and in his mind, it can't be all that different, the divide between the dreamer and the dream. PASIV technology has shown him that much in recent years. So he devises a test.

During night-time, when the streets of Likoni are still loud and alive, he goes to the road outside of Mrs. Luo's house. He crouches down, among the vendors selling late-night ugali and plates of mtuzi wa samaki with cold bottles of urwaga, banana beer, among the fires of their grills and the simmering steadiness of their soups. He crouches there and makes sure that he is hidden behind a wheeled cart, only visible to someone who is trying to look.

He takes a bottle from inside his shirt and removes its cap. He takes another bottle from a bag and he mixes two drops of vinegar inside the first bottle, which contains an ordinary dream from one of his ordinary dreamers. He shakes the mixture of dream and vinegar three times, and then he pours it over the dusty road.

There is not a dream-eater alive who can ignore the scent of a ruined dream. Yusuf finds it offensively putrid, and a waste even though it was an all-too-ordinary meal, a dream about flying that has grown mundane to one who eats them all too often.

He waits there, pressing his fingers to the side of his nose, his head aching. He waits until she comes, a gossamer light presence in the periphery of his vision, almost too quick to be seen until she slows her steps and sniffs the air.

"I think it's about time we met," Yusuf says, and she startles badly. She begins to run, but he blocks her way.

"I know what you are," he says, "and I want to help you."

"What I am?" she says in accented English. Her dark hair is windblown, and it curls over her flushed cheeks. He can see why Gitonga had been so enamoured of her. "How can you know what I am when I myself do not know?"

"You know that you are not alive," Yusuf says.

She tenses. "If I am not alive, then how am I able to be here? Is this heaven then? Or hell? Since you have all the answers, you might as well enlighten me."

He touches her wrists. She tenses even further, but he makes his movements gentle, showing her that he means no harm. "There is no pulse, you see?" Yusuf explains. "There is no heartbeat. There is no _smell_." He sniffs her skin. "Consider me an expert on the subject of the supernatural. You see these people walking the streets, enjoying themselves? You are not one of them."

"What am I then?" she asks in barely a whisper.

"Someone must have loved you very much, to dream you into being with such ferocity," Yusuf says. "I have heard stories about people like you. I was skeptical at first, but I see you now. I can feel the deadness in the air around you. I have never witnessed such a thing before, even with the most broken dream-eaters, when they become like ghosts." He makes a rueful gesture. "I have my pride, but I can admit when I am wrong."

"I wish you weren't," she says.

Her name, he learns, is Mal.

 

* * *

 

He tells her again that he can help her, and she seems as if she wants to flee instead. But then she nods tightly and follows him back to Old Town, to his den. "I don't remember anything," she says. "I have these memories in my head, but I don't know if they're mine. All I know for sure is that three weeks ago I found myself wandering the marketplace. I don't know how I got there."

She falls silent after that, and is quiet as he unlocks the door. When she sees his dreamers, there's a tenseness to her shoulders that he can't help but notice. Then she shakes it off and sits down on the seat that Gitonga had used two days ago.

She waits.

"You may well be the first of your kind," Yusuf tells her. "So anything that I say or think is strictly experimental. But I assure you, I am the oldest being in this city, quite likely the oldest in this country, possibly even the entire continent. If anyone can help you figure out your situation, it's me."

"What do you want in return?" Mal asks.

"Consider it satisfying a scientific curiosity," he says.

"It can't be as simple as that."

"The world is simple," Yusuf says. "We eat, we drink, we fuck, and then we go to sleep." He watches the movement of her eyes, and notices how she keeps on looking back at the dreamers. He realizes after a few minutes of observation that it's not disgust at all that she feels. "You are hungry," he says, not a question.

"Is that what you call it, this heaviness in my stomach?" she says. "Is that what hunger feels like?" She turns to him. Her eyes are hollow, but they are not empty.

Yusuf smiles. "Let me show you."

He moves towards his dreamers, beckoning for her to follow. There are rows of them, sprawled across beds and couches, sheets tangled in limbs. He walks past Elisabet and touches her on the forehead — perhaps it is only his imagination, but she seems to smile. He goes to Chibuzo, one of his more placid dreamers, and kneels beside him, unhooking the vial that ends in a clear plastic tube. The vial is undistilled, but Chibuzo's dreams are rarely dangerous. He hands it to Mal and says, "Drink."

"I was always told not to take candy from strangers," she says. "But what do I have to lose?"

"That's the attitude," Yusuf says.

She drinks.

Then she tilts the bottle upside down and slides her finger inside, soaking up the last remaining drops. She licks her finger, and then rolls it inside her mouth. She makes a sound that's half breath, half sob, but when she remembers that he's watching, she quickly stops and takes a more sedate lick. A lick nonetheless, drawn to it helplessly.

"It's good, isn't it?" Yusuf asks knowingly, and the look Mal gives him is disdain and disbelief, and something else besides.

"He dreams of chimeras," she says. "They taste like strawberries."

"I wouldn't know," he replies. "I've never eaten strawberries."

"Never?"

" _This_ is all I know," Yusuf says. "This is all I remember." If that is pity that he reads in her face, pity that softens some of the aloofness — he neither wants it nor needs it. He takes the empty vial from Mal's fingers. She is holding it so tightly he has to pull, and when their fingers brush, he feels how icy she is, how inhuman. "So you're a dream who eats dreams," he adds. "I seem to have found myself a rare treasure indeed."

She stirs, dark-lashed eyes upon him. "I'm your not treasure."

 

* * *

 

She grows stronger.

It may be true that in her heart — or what passes for a living dream's heart, or their lungs, or their blood — that she wishes to leave, but she recognizes the value in Yusuf. He makes sure that she does. There is no easier way to feed in Mombasa than to stay with him, and she has no money to leave.

"I must have been created here, but why?" she wonders one day, watching idly as he fills clandestine prescriptions for the customers who keep his business afloat. "This city has no meaning for me. It has no special relevance."

"And what of the person who dreamed you into being?" he asks.

She says nothing.

"You say that you have memories," Yusuf prompts, because she is fascinating to him, and because he has the nasty habit of probing fascinating subjects until they lose their fascination — maybe it will be the same with her, but he hopes that it will be a long time in coming.

"I have... things that I know to be true in my head," Mal says quietly. "But are they my memories, or are they _hers_?"

"Or they are the memories of your creator," Yusuf says.

She shrugs with one shoulder. " _Peut-être_. I am stupid. I am like a child you lead around by the hand." She stands up and walks to the window, where she gazes at the Old Town crowds. The sunlight pierces through her hair, and it lifts the dust from her skin. Yusuf watches her for a while, and then he goes back to the prescriptions. Mal does not move for hours, because she is a living dream and time is but a suggestion. Not even dream-eaters have that quality.

When Yusuf finishes his work, he says, "Let's go hunting."

He has never taken Mal hunting before. He has confined her to the tame cage of his den, to the regular feedings from his precious dreamers. This may have been a mistake, he thinks, but it is one that he will correct. Mal follows him without a word, and they descend together into the night-time city.

"What are you hungry for?" he asks. "Student? Thug? Boy with the scraped knees?" He points at the boy with a crooked smile, inviting her to laugh, but Mal does not respond to the humour. She rarely does. Instead she blinks at him as if she only now recalls that he exists.

"Whatever you want," she says.

"It's acceptable for you to have an opinion of your own, you do know."

"It doesn't matter," she says, and he stares at her for a while until he turns to his left, a quick soldierly move. He takes her through the crowds and the light, through back alleys and under shingled roofs. Through the paths he has walked, and paths he has never walked before, but has only heard of. When they stop, they are in front of St. Joseph Church, and Yusuf is climbing through the gate and up the walls.

It only occurs to him afterwards that she might not be able to follow. He doesn't know how good her dexterity is, and his is only bought from centuries of practice. But he shouldn't have worried. When he reaches the window and twists it open, she is right behind him.

It is a hot night. Yusuf's sweat beads up under his collar, but Mal seems not to feel it at all. She is lovely and cold when she comes to stand beside him, gazing down at the priest who sleeps in the single, sparse room. The priest's nose bridge shines with sweat and humidity — he has kicked all of his already thin blankets to the floor.

The dreams of holy men are a matter of some division among dream-eaters. They are intense tastes, unforgiving. One either loves them or hates them. Yusuf, as it happens, loves them, because he can see all the spheres of the world in a single taste of a priest's dream, ambition and desire and temperance — an unusual combination that tastes all the sweeter to him, this strange fey combination of want and sacrifice couched in delightful metaphors that make his throat sing after the drinking.

And this is what he wants to show Mal, that sometimes one needs to drink directly from the source. Willing dreamers bottling their visions in plastic tubes is a convenience that Yusuf will never give up, but there is a feral order in this too, in leaning over the sleeping priest and pressing their mouths together, tender and soft. Mal once asked what Yusuf would do if the dreamer woke up, but they never wake for Yusuf.

Yusuf inhales the dream with vigor. He is generous, however. He takes only a little, and he leaves the rest for Mal.

"Beasts and burdens and the end of days," she whispers after she drinks. "Oh!"

This is the first night he sees her smile.

 

* * *

 

They become, if not friends after that night, then at least she is more willing to speak. She will sit with a book while he works, and she will even talk to some of his customers for him, if they should come by while he is out. As for books, she likes Cousteau, and Dumas, but her favourite is Proust. Yusuf buys her _À la recherche du temps perdu_ and she reads with her lips pursed together and her right hand in her lap. After she finishes it, she disappears and does not return for five days.

When she does return, she has bruises all over her arms. She says, "I was married, I think. Or at least the person who used to be me. I had children."

"Statistically likely," Yusuf says amiably. "A good percentage of the human population seems to fall into that category."

"I killed myself," she says. "Why do you seem so pleased by that? You're smiling!"

"Do you know how dream-eaters are made?" he asks.

She shakes her head.

"A dream-eater is made from a failed suicide. Oh, not every failed suicide, or the earth would be overrun with us. But every now and then, when the sun is right and the moon is willing, we will wake up from our noose, or put down our gun. We will breathe, when we had thought we never would. We will find that the air is different, and so are we."

"You don't understand," Mal says. "I wasn't a failed suicide. I _succeeded_."

"You are a special case in many ways," Yusuf says. "Haven't I impressed that upon you by now? Living dreams seem to play by an entirely different rule. Still, I smile because now there is that connection, even if the circumstances do not match. Now there is a bit of logic returned to us."

"You love logic that much," she says coldly.

"What I love —" Yusuf pauses. He looks at her. "I tried to kill myself for love. There was a girl, and a promise. I lived in Harappa, I think. I can't remember too much of it anymore, but I remember that. A girl, a promise, and a tree. You might have heard of this tree. _Cerbera odollam_. It grows in India, along salt swamps and marshy areas. It produces a fruit that looks like a small mango. This fruit is extremely toxic. Do you know what they call this tree?"

"No," she says shortly.

"They call it the suicide tree," Yusuf says, and he thinks of it: a warm day, and the two halves of the fruit in his mouth, the last true thing he ever ate. "So don't talk to me of love. I know more of love than I ever care to."

Mal wraps her arms around herself. Her fingers stroke her own bruises. They look like maps. "How old are you, actually?" she asks. "Sometimes I think, 'he cannot be much older than than the other dream-eaters who came and gawked at me'. Then I think, 'no, he is much older than that.'"

"I am older then the Vedas," Yusuf says. "Barring an unforeseen knife to the gut or a bullet to the brain, I believe I shall live forever."

"I believe," she replies, "that's the most tragic thing I've ever heard."

 

* * *

 

"Are you feeling mischievous today?" Yusuf asks.

Mal stops playing with the straps on her sandals. "Will it hurt?" she asks mildly. "Whatever it is you're thinking of."

"You and I," Yusuf says, "are going to go Hollywood." He throws the _Daily Nation_ onto her lap, flipped open to an article he's circled in the entertainment section on the filming of a new Soderbergh film in Mombasa. The lead actress is the A-list Kenyan-American Adia Omondi, and Mal studies the grainy black-and-white photo of Omondi with burgeoning curosity.

"My resources say she's staying at the Bellamy," Yusuf says with an open smile. "What do you say? Want to find out what the stars dream about?"

"Will it be extraordinarily difficult?" Mal wonders. "She probably has lots of security."

"It will be _very_ difficult," Yusuf says, "and we have to work within a short time frame. They're only shooting here for a week."

She stands up. "Then I'm in."

The Bellamy Hotel, within view of old historic Fort Jesus, is ritz and glitz and theirs for the taking. Yusuf has a domino mask that looks like a crow. Mal wears one that looks like a swan. He extends his arm to her, gentleman-like, as they enter the lobby, and this time she doesn't even hesitate before taking it. They stroll in together, over the floors tiled as smooth as blood. Yusuf has carefully orchestrated a boiler to explode, and so in the ensuing rush no one gives them a second glance as they get into the elevator and punch the button for the tenth floor, where Omondi is staying.

The first thing they see when the elevator doors open is a suited guard in shades. Yusuf lets go of Mal apologetically, and then he punches the guard out.

He's quick, so quick that by the time the second guard comes running down the hall, he's already reared back with his fingers clenched in another fist. He swings again, a boxer's strength matched with a physician's knowledge of anatomy, and he immobilizes their nerves, knocking them into unconsciousness like a set of toy figurines. A third guard enters the hall, shouting into his earpiece, but Yusuf whirls around and yanks it off. He knees the guard in the groin, and then slams his head into the wall.

It's too late though. They've already contacted the outside. Soon this floor is going to be overrun with police and security, so they have to work fast.

Yusuf makes his way to the suite at the end of the hall, where the third guard emerged. He's got his hand on the knob when he hears another sound behind him — the ping of the elevator, and then the sound of them opening. "Mal," he says in warning as three men lunge out of the elevator with guns, but Mal doesn't even blink.

She takes them down with three kicks, one after another.

"I didn't know I could do that," she says, looking down at the heap of knocked out bodies on the floor.

"You're a dream, a phantom," Yusuf says. "You can do anything."

In the room there are two more guards, and then Omondi herself, trying to climb out of her balcony. She's very beautiful, cornrow hair tight against her scalp. "Who the fuck are you?" she yells when she sees Yusuf and Mal, but Mal doesn't answer her question. Mal grabs her by the ankle and pulls her off the balcony and back into the room.

"Needle," she says, and Yusuf hands it over. Mal pins Omondi down and jabs the needle into her thigh.

Omondi screams —

And then she goes quiet. She falls asleep.

"How does she taste?" Yusuf asks later, when they're in a car and he's driving them as far away from the Bellamy as he can. Mal sits in the backseat, cradling Omondi her arms. She presses her mouth to Omondi's neck, smelling the perfume, and then to her lips.

"Like lost hopes," Mal says. "I wouldn't have thought."

 

* * *

 

"Is she here?" Gitonga asks eagerly.

"No, she's out shopping," Yusuf answers. "I think she likes to go to the marketplace and walk around. It seems to calm her."

"Calm her?" Gitonga repeats. "She's a dream. She's not even real. What is there to _calm_?"

"I'm starting to wonder what we mean when we say 'not real,'" Yusuf muses. "What is our standard for real? What are the variables we are using to compare it to?" He fetches his friend a seat and pours for him another fine vintage: the dream of woman who believed herself a fox. It's a very red dream, and it smells of pine needles.

Gitonga smiles wryly. "She's gotten to you, hasn't she? I told you. I told you from the very beginning, and you laughed at me."

"I'm not laughing anymore," Yusuf promises.

"You should," Gitonga says. "You need to laugh more. Oh, you're happy enough most of the time. You're perfectly genial. But you seem lonely to me. I hope you don't mind me saying so, but it's true." He gazes at Yusuf's bookshelves, at the scratchy writing on the documents that sprawl across his desk. "I imagine she's lonely too."

"Indeed, you are quite the matchmaker," Yusuf says.

"I don't mean—"

"The worst dream of all is the dream of boredom," Yusuf says. "It's all right. I'm glad. Thank you."

Gitonga relaxes. He's heard the stories about what Yusuf does to people who offend him, and suggesting romantic entanglements with women who aren't even real might fall into that realm of offense. "You must think about it though," he offers tentatively. "Not the — not what I was referring to before. But you say she sleeps?"

"Strangely, yes," Yusuf says. "I've given her the spare room where I used to keep my overflow equipment. I've bought her a bed, and she seems to use it. But one can dream within a dream, so why not? It's simply a matter of creativity, and Mal is very creative."

"What does she dream about?"

"It would be rude to ask," Yusuf says archly.

"You must want to know," Gitonga presses. " _I_ want to know. Just think of it — the dream of a dream." He looks guilty, and excited. "Do you think you could eat such a thing? What would it be like?"

 

* * *

 

Elisabet is ill. She dreams in shaky fevers, and her throat is wracked with coughs. Yusuf increases her sedation and feeds her pills, sitting by her side and wiping the sweat from her forehead with a wet towel, waiting for the fever to break.

Mal is trying to grow roses in the windowsills. It doesn't work. They keep on dying.

"Is she going to die too?" Mal finally asks, lowering the bottle of water with the top sliced off that she uses for the recalcitrant flowers. She comes over and eyes Elisabet dispassionately.

"It's a virus, that's all," Yusuf says. "There is no death here."

"None?" Mal asks. "Maybe not for you, I agree, but for them." She waves her arm around, spilling some of the water. Over in the corner of the room, Chibozu exhales. "Are they going to grow old here? Are they going to die without ever waking up?"

"If they want," says Yusuf. He takes the bottle from Mal before she can do more damage. He pours the remaining water over the towel and dabs it to Elisabet's forehead. "You don't seem to understand. They came to me for a _reason_. They asked to live like this."

"Live?" Mal's laughter is sharp and silver. "This isn't living."

"And clearly you are the expert in this matter," Yusuf says, and he doesn't change his voice at all, but the neutral tone makes Mal hesitate more so than if he yelled.

"I just think, they could have so much, if only they would stop dreaming," she says. Her arms drop to her sides. "They could have — they could everything that I want. They could go home again."

"They have that oppurtunity," Yusuf informs her. "Do you think I keep them sedated _all_ the time?" He shakes his head. "Every year, once a year. I wake them up and I give them the choice. Eight times out of ten, they don't take it. But you see? I am holding no one captive."

"You think what you are doing is a sort of mercy," Mal realizes.

"When you hunt people for your own survival, the greatest thing you can do is mercy," Yusuf says. Elisabet is hot and shaky underneath his palm, her sweat moistening his heart and life lines, but he strokes her gently, murmuring _shhh, shhh, I am here, all will be well_. He does not even think of the quality of dreams that will come out of this feverish bought. It isn't why he keeps her. She was fourteen when she came to him, an orphan and an addict. He recalls the curve of her bones. He says, "Cruelty is for the animals, and we may be monsters, but we are not animals."

"You are not a monster, sir, but a saint!" Mal mocks.

"They love us," Yusuf tells her succinctly. "They are drawn to us. They think we can cure them. What other choice do we have?"

Mal closes her eyes. "You're right. Ignore me. I'm frustrated, I'm restless, the damn roses won't grow. I speak because I have nothing else to do." She opens her eyes again and laughs, the sound of it sharpening on a whetstone. "Maybe I do know something of living, after all."

 

* * *

 

She walks on the roof, sometimes. August brings the monsoon rains from the southeast, wetting the shingles so that Yusuf worries she'll slip, but Mal is a creature with a light step. There are moments when he goes outside and watches her that she seems to vanish entirely, leaping from one roof to another — she is there, and then she is not, but the air seems thinner afterwards, high altitude dizziness that makes Yusuf blink.

"There are cracks," she says to him one night after they've gone hunting again, and secured between them a young man, a student and a political rebel, whose dreams taste like gunpowder. "I can find them when I look."

"The architecture is hardly standardized, and the maintenance efforts—"

"Not cracks in the roof," Mal says. "Cracks between here and there, then and now."

Yusuf stares at her.

"Never mind," Mal says, turning away, and she is full of secrets now, spaces Yusuf can never reach. He looks at her and sees, yes, dark hair and large eyes and skin that is corpse white even in the dark — but he also sees a _will_ , Mal taking shape and form before his very eyes. Mal going for walks longer and longer. Mal disappearing for weeks instead of days, and returning with salt underneath her fingernails and chicken feathers stuck in her hair. She won't tell him anything, this one, and Yusuf is a patient man in many regards, but this is not an area where he exhibits that particular virtue.

Still, though, he wants to make her happy. She is the ivy that breaks through the dry, arid land. She is the legend that pushes through the pages of the book. She is wondrous when she hunts, and she is glorious when she feeds.

"What do you dream about?" Yusuf asks.

"I didn't know you cared," she replies. Then she leans over and touches her hand to his, taking some of the sting out of it.

"I dream about you," she says, but this is a lie.

She is going to leave him. Yusuf has been alone for so long. He recognizes when a door opens and closes. So he brings her gifts, beautiful jewelery with glass beads and rosaries. He brings her flowers, freshly cut, that fill the den like the gardens of Versailles. He brings her books, and dresses, and music boxes that play anything you ask them to — he has wonders in his collection, and he will show them to her if she wants.

He brings a bottle with a faded white ribbon around its neck, and he sets it down in front of her. Mal closes her book and tilts her head. "What is this?" she asks.

"This is one of my most special vintages," Yusuf says. "If you liked the priest's dream, then I think you will appreciate this."

There are only a few mouthfuls left in the bottle. Yusuf portions out all but the last of them. The glass he gives Mal is a tumbler he bought in a Peruvian marketplace, from a dream-eater who stole it from a man who murdered his wife. The tumbler shows the liquid clearly — a faded golden colour that when Mal lifts it to her nose to smell, smells like sweat and smoke.

"Not very pleasant," she remarks.

"This dreamer had a hard life," Yusuf says.

This is what it tastes like: like fire scorching down your throat, like pain, like agony, like fear and betrayal and _why me why me why me_. But also of _I must be strong_ and _I will be strong_. It tastes like rags and prison and the chewiness of rats, and then, as you gulp the last of it down, it tastes like victory. The change happens so powerfully that suddenly you forget about the fire and the pain and the fear — the victory is music scored on the tongue, like trumpets on a clear grassy field, like an angel of God coming down to take you by the hand and say _let us go then, you have done enough_.

"A martyr's dream," Mal says wonderingly. She shudders with delight, and then she examines the nearly empty bottle. The label on it says _3 ml, obtained May 30 1431, at Rouen_.

"She was a peasant girl," Yusuf says. "Her name was Jeanne d'Arc."

 

* * *

 

"We make saints out of the ruins of our empires," he says.

"And what if we don't have empires?" she asks.

He places his hand over his heart. "We all have empires."

 

* * *

 

It ends, like this:

He watches her. He watches her until his eyes grow blurry with it and she is but a cataract, an illness that he cannot cure. He watches her until she starts watching him in return, and that is how he knows that she will betray him one day. He has shared his cabinet of curiosities with her, he has shared his history — he was weak, to think that it did not matter because she was only a dream.

It ends, like this:

He grows thirsty. He walks into his cellars and he realizes that he has tasted all of them before, and there is nothing new — he has had so many priest dreams, so many madman dreams, so many dreams of actresses, that none of it makes his blood rush more than seeing Mal come out of her room first thing in the morning, yawning as she shakes off the last of her sleep.

It ends, like this:

He is not a good man.

It ends, like this:

Gitonga was right.

It ends, like this:

He waits until she is dreaming, and then he unlocks the door to her room with the key in his belt. She is curled into a ball, her knees tucked to her chest. She is murmuring, saying a name. He touches his hand to her haughty cheek, which has never felt snow before, or a kiss, or a thunderstorm. She is the New World. She is the fabric of everything he has known come to rearrange itself in this maddening woman who does not even tell him what she dreams about — after he has given her so much wealth.

 _You are selfish_ , he thinks. _This is my due_.

(He is selfish too, but in his mind he has paid the price for it long ago, dying underneath the shadow of a fruit tree).

She stirs in her dream. Her mouth parts. Yusuf goes to his knees.

She opens her eyes.

"What are you doing?" she asks, her voice rough and husky. But it is a question that hardly needs answering, not when she sees him flushed and anticipatory, and so she kicks off her covers and scrambles back onto the bed. "No!" she says. "Not like this. I am not _yours_."

"Consider it payment for food and board," Yusuf says. "It is but a small price, surely."

" _No_ ," she says, and he does not know what possesses him to grab her by the wrist and yank her forward, except that it ends like this — and he is too much a hunter to be the prey. Yet the equilibrium shifts between them, uneasy. She kicks him in the chest, knocking the air out of his lungs. He tightens his grip, pushing her down, but Mal flips them over and gouges her fingers into his eyes.

Yusuf shouts. He reaches for her to do _something_ — to hit, to punch, to fight — but her weight lifts from him and she is gone. She has slipped through the cracks.

 _I shouldn't have done this_ , Yusuf thinks, sick with regret.

(But really what he thinks is _I should have done this better_ ).

 

* * *

 

He never sees her again, though he hears the rumours. A living dream encountered in Singapore, in Sri Jayawardenapura, in Berlin. This time he believes the stories. He pays people to bring him photos, and sometimes they even look like her, though most of the time it's a white blur, a body already in the motions of turning away, uncaught. He searches her up in databases and finds records of a suicide: Mallorie Miles Cobb. He studies her driver's license photo until his hands go shaky. He looks for truths he doesn't know if he wants to find.

A package comes for him in February. Brown paper, ratty string. He opens it and finds a vial, unlabeled. He dabs a few drops onto his index finger and licks it experimentally, and this is what he sees:

There is a man on the beach, and there are two children with him: a boy and a girl. They are building sandcastles while the man reads the newspaper and watches them protectively. The waves come in; they go out. The girl throws a handful of sand at the boy. The boy starts crying. The man puts down his newspaper and goes to them, picking up the boy on one hip while he admonishes his sister. Then he promises them ice cream if they behave.

A letter arrives in the mail three days later, with a Mexican stamp. _Because you were kind to me, at first_ , it says.

In June, he meets Dom Cobb.

 

* * *

 

"She died," Cobb says. "She jumped off the ledge, and she died."

"That is one way to think of it," Yusuf replies, but he doesn't explain himself, and Cobb leaves the room in anger.

 

* * *

 

The roses start to grow.

  
  
  
  



End file.
